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Thunder’s Mouth: The Story

Ainslie’s original title song, Thunder’s Mouth,
comes of split lineage. While the title phrase comes from Shakespeare,
the setting and body of the song were inspired by slave narratives
from the Nashville, TN area. As the Civil War was ending former
slaves, frantic to re-assemble families sold off in different
directions, flocked to the closest cities or towns hoping to
find lost husbands, children, parents and grand parents. Reminding
Ainslie of the days immediately following 9-11 in New York
city when surviving family members searched for, hoped and prayed
for members of their families to walk out of the dust in lower
Manhattan.

Ainslie’s It’s Gonna Rain, is the kind of song
you wish you had written: a song of lost love set in south
Louisiana that saw its first performance around the 4th of
July, 2005, just prior to Katrina’s arrival and the failure
of the levees and our government in New Orleans. As Ainslie
says, "Six weeks later, without changing a word, it became
a song - not about losing somebody – but about losing a city.
And for my money, one of the coolest cities in the world."

Ainslie’s two other originals on the collection have obvious
African roots - a kora-inspired fretless gourd banjo tune, If
Anybody Asks You About Me, and I Should Get Over
This, a heartbreaker set to a danceable West African-inspired
guitar part.

A transcriber of Mississippi Delta Blues legend Robert Johnson’s
music, Ainslie cut Johnson’s Dust My Broom for
the CD late one night after his wife had gone to bed. You can
hear the softer delivery of this vocal; he was trying not to
wake her.

Opening with J. B. Lenoir’s Down In Mississippi,
and an accapella version of Delta Bluesman Son House’s wonderful Don’t
You Mind People Grinnin’ In Your Face; Ainslie moves
on to Oil In My Vessel, an old-time gospel tune
from one of the oldest surviving Black old-time fiddlers, North
Carolinian Joe Thompson.

Ainslie’s dark C-minor tuning version of Another Man
Done Gone, learned from a 1938 John Lomax field recording
of Alabama singer Vera Hall settles down beautifully in this
body of work. As does Ainslie’s version of Tom Waits’ Little
Trip To Heaven.

In addition to Ainslie’s muscular guitar playing, mandolin,
and vocals, Thunder’s Mouth features Grammy award-winning
cellist Eugene Friesen of Paul Winter Consort;
Lafayette, Louisiana native Sam Broussard,
who contributes mightily to the sound and emotional feel of
the tracks; and T-Bone Wolk, a bassist and
road warrior with Hall & Oates. In addition to bass, Wolk
contributes accordian, keyboard, guitar and hand percussion
to the tracks.

Thunder’s Mouth was mixed and mastered with
Grammy award-winning engineer Corin Nelsen at
Will Ackerman’s Imaginary Road Studios in Windham County, Vermont
in the winter and spring of 2008.